The advent of computer-readable content objects (e.g., text files, presentations, spreadsheets, mixed text and graphics documents, audio files, etc.) has led to the development of various techniques for sharing such objects. One such technique involves merely attaching the objects to an email and sending them to others. Techniques that attach shared documents or other objects to an email run the risk of divergence due to multiple un-synchronized modifications of different instances of the shared objects (e.g., since there are many copies of such objects). Improved, but still deficient alternative sharing techniques involve live presentations where a live presentation of a particular content object is shared with a geographically dispersed online audience. In this case, a presenter navigates through a presentation object on the presenter's user device, while a remote set of participants (e.g., the audience) follow along on their respective user devices by seeing the presenter's actions over the presentation object. Such techniques involve sending a series of images to the audience members so the audience members can follow along by seeing the series of images change as the presenter navigates through the presentation object. Audio commentary from the presenter to the audience often accompanies the series of images.
Unfortunately, legacy approaches that capture a series of still images of the presenter's view of the presentation object and distribute it in real time to participants for viewing at their user devices are deficient, at least in that the sending and processing of the images is resource intensive, and sometimes the received images suffer from poor image quality (e.g., due to poor or unpredictable network bandwidth availability). Strictly as one example of the wasteful resource usage, many sequences of images/snapshots are distributed to all audience members during even simple navigation (e.g., page down, zoom in, change pointer, etc.). This wastefulness increases with the size of the collaboration group. Still more, wasteful resource consumption will continue to grow commensurate with greater and greater adoption of online sharing of larger and larger corpora of shared documents. What is needed is a technological solution that facilitates efficient live presentation of content objects to multiple audience members.
Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.